Today’s paragraphs come to us from Byron York, writing for the Washington Examiner. They are meant to show skepticism over the rosy view of Barack Obama’s presidency painted – not surprisingly – by Mr. Obama himself, during his speech at the Democrats’ National Convention:
In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 73 percent of registered voters said the country is on the wrong track, while just 18 percent said it is headed in the right direction. The 73 percent figure is the second-highest in the president’s nearly eight years in office.
The poll was no outlier. These are the wrong-track numbers for the last ten polls in the RealClearPolitics average of polls: 67, 70, 67, 71, 73, 69, 79, 68, 60 and 66.
And yet, in spite of clear evidence that a majority of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, the president exhorted the nation, “Thank you for this incredible journey — let’s keep it going.”
Obama spoke as if broad areas of American life are better than ever, even if there remains work to be done. When Obama said, “My time in this office — it hasn’t fixed everything,” the millions of voters who believe the country is on the wrong track might have seen that as a significant understatement.
“By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started,” Obama said. On one hand, that is true for some Americans, given the depths of economic distress the country was entering in January 2009. But on the other hand, even with terrible economic conditions, the percentage of Americans who believed the country was on the wrong track went down dramatically in Obama’s first months in office — it fell to 43 percent in April 2009 — because many people had faith in Obama to make things better. Today, with the wrong track number 30 points higher, they no longer believe.
Nobody brags more about Barack Obama than Barack Obama. Nobody. And, unfortunately, actual facts are not a necessary element of what he brags about.
Mr. York was nice enough to keep his commentary general in nature, citing only the few statistics seen above. But he could have shown a lot more.
For example, foreign policy-wise, Mr. York gives us nothing specific about ISIS, or Syria, or Libya, or the mess Mr. Obama’s “policies”made of what had been at least a tenuously positive situation in Iraq, ditto for Afghanistan.
And, domestically, Mr. York did not cite the enormous jump in food stamp recipients, the drop of workforce participation to a 38 year low, and the significant loss of real income (that’s what happens when the “job growth” you crow about is, in reality, a transformation from good full-time jobs to part-time work).
But, since it can be argued that the enormous jump in people who believe we are on the wrong track inherently encapsulates these specifics, I award Byron York Paragraphs Of The Day honors.
Besides, if he wanted to detail all the things Barack Obama got wrong, this would have to be a “Doctoral Dissertation Of The Day” award.
